The plot against Harry

The following passage kicks off the chapter on comic legend Harry Langdon in Smileage Guaranteed: Past Humor, Present Laughter, the invaluable reference tome written by film historian/friend of the blog Richard M. Roberts: All right...that’s it—hey, you!  Yes, you—come here!  It’s time for a heart-to-heart, mano a mano.  Now I know there’s a lot of…

“A séance is held in the Great House at Collinwood…”

To address her nephew David’s (David Henesy) insistence that he’s seen and spoken with an apparition (Sharon Smyth) identified as Sarah Collins, family matriarch Elizabeth Stoddard Collins (Joan Bennett) reluctantly agrees to participate in a séance along with her brother Roger (Louis Edmonds), daughter Carolyn (Nancy Barrett), Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall), and Victoria Winters…

“And they used Bon Ami!”

Before my family and I relocated from Teays Valley to Ravenswood, West Virginia in the fall of 1972, I spent my formative years attending St. Francis of Assisi in St. Albans.  It was a Catholic school, and I’ve always had mixed feelings about it because while I remember with great fondness the wonderful friends I made…

“Hello again…Peabody and Sherman here…”

I was an underachiever in my high school years. Mind you, I did all right scholastically...though admittedly, I didn’t always apply myself where studying was concerned. In retrospect, I don’t have too many regrets because most of what I was taught focused on memorizing facts and regurgitating them on command...as opposed to far-more-practical critical thinking…

“My name is Victoria Winters…”

There was an unsettling rumor going around last November that the long-running daytime drama Days of Our Lives was in danger of getting a pink slip and losing its parking place at NBC...but DOOL’s demise turned out to be a premature one, and it was confirmed that the program would soldier on with Season 56.…

Squeezing one in before the Old Year ends

The Thrilling Days of Yesteryear faithful are certainly entitled to an explanation as to why it’s been so quiet around these parts since mid-August...and I’m not making much progress beyond going out for a pack of cigarettes and losing track of the time.  (I’ve heard this a time or two in movies and TV.)  The…

“Around Dodge City and into territory on west…”

Although I was very much familiar with Gunsmoke the TV series throughout my childhood—the program ran on WCHS-TV like tap water, and during my second year at Marshall University, WVAH-TV made it “Must See TV” for my fellow dormmates on weeknights—I never heard a broadcast of the radio Gunsmoke until that same sophomore Marshall year. …

From the DVR: The Wonderful World of Disney

The Starz/Encore people have managed to acquire some feature film titles from Walt Disney Pictures of late, because I was afforded an opportunity to catch up with two of the studio’s animation releases that had eluded me for a good while: The Princess and the Frog (2009; I liked this one) and Frozen (2013; not…

I can’t win for losin’ you

My longtime paisan Jeff Lane broke the news to me on Facebook yesterday that country singer-songwriter Earl Thomas Conley left this world for a better one yesterday at the age of 77.  Blake Shelton, who scored one of his early chart hits (#18 in 2002) with the Conley-penned All Over Me, remarked on Twitter that ETC “was my all…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Noir Archive Volume 1: 1944-1954

In Jacobellis vs. Ohio (1964), a U.S. Supreme Court case addressing the First Amendment (an Ohio movie theatre banned the 1958 Louis Malle film Les Amants because they believed it to be “obscene”), Justice Potter Stewart made a famous observation about obscenity that has become a colloquial expression today.  “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I…